Ladies and gentlemen,
[…]1 perhaps I can just say that, when I speak here of rationality and irrationality, I am using the terms very much in Max Weber’s sense, with the intention of immanent critique – that is, to show that, in fact, society does not even live up to the notion of rationality in question. But if you are at all uncertain about these terms, I would ask you to look them up in Economy and Society,2 the text by Weber to which I am chiefly referring. When I spoke to you last time about the category of the administered world, what I meant by this was an overall constitution of rational irrationality, in so far as rationality rules as something particular, in so far as there is a balance between the goals set by the individual, separate and mutually antagonistic sectors of social organization and the means used to meet them, in the sense – to finally explain this concept of rationality, for heaven’s sake – that the means used on the whole offer the best chance to achieve the respective goals – so that is the meaning of rationality used here – but that, on the other hand, the overall constitution of society, the purpose of human coexistence, remains largely irrational and at the mercy of a blind interplay of forces. You could also turn this around, and you could just as easily speak of irrational rationality, which is to say that this end–means rationality not only fails to resolve the irrationality of the whole but might, as I tried to show you in the last session, actually increase it.
But with these reflections, and here I am moving away from an immanent critique of Weber, it is crucial that such terms as ‘administration’, ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘management’ – that one is especially popular at the moment – are not hypostasized, that one does not use them as if the organizational forms themselves were the problem, rather than the social content which these terms represent. What lies behind these terms are not so-called purely sociological categories, that is, ones which refer to the form of interpersonal relationships; rather, they consistently express power relations, power relations that are still – and consider this the decisive point for a theory of society today – based on control over material production. So they are irrational in the old sense that these administrative categories imply not the administration of things but power over people, and by ignoring this, by treating them in a seemingly value-free way purely according to their form, namely as legally rational institutions, one is abstracting from the decisive point. And such a seemingly purely methodological abstraction, which turns these categories into ones of so-called pure sociology, actually has a contentual meaning, and precisely this contentual meaning slips through the cracks in the whole sociologization of these categories. So the power relations cloak themselves in the bureaucratic procedures, and it is because these power relations determine them, not because administration itself already has these traits, though one should emphasize one thing – I must return to it later in a different context – namely that, because these technically sociological categories, if you will, came about under the prevailing conditions of production and bear their imprint, it is extremely hard to differentiate concretely between that which is genuinely determined by the conditions of production, which has social content, and that which is of a technologically formal kind. But precisely this entanglement of social content and administrative rationality as a form is now acting as an ideology for the fact that people really consider this administrative form the decisive thing, with the implication that, whenever a rational planning of society and organization stands in opposition to an anarchy of commodity production, such power relations must be reproduced there; but this is a false assumption, for these forms take on that disastrous social meaning only because they already constitute themselves within the concrete differences of power to control the means of production. So the identity of bureaucracy and power does apply empirically; however, it follows not from the structure of bureaucracy itself but from its becoming independent, which is in turn an expression of prevailing conditions, and it is precisely this becoming independent, ultimately determined by economic motives or economic objectivities, that I meant by the administered world. So it is not a matter of bureaucracy or administration in itself; these things and their entanglement with power are not a formally sociological law but, rather, depend on real control over the work of others. So-called purely sociological concept formation, which passes over this in keeping with the interdisciplinary division of labour and assigns to economy as a separate branch these relationships I have been discussing, and thus already becomes ideology prior to any specific content.
I think you can understand now what I meant when I once said that the bureaucrat or the manager today is largely the ‘scapegoat of the administered world’,3 and that consequently the concept of the administered world, if absolutized into a superficial and convenient cultural critique, is completely inadequate. The anger over personalized epiphenomena, like the role of managers and bureaucracy, does not penetrate to the matter itself and thus often has only a fascist implication, just as invective against supposedly inhuman bureaucrats plays an important part for the fascists. It is rather instructive in this context that the entire official state and city bureaucracy that existed was fought and denounced by the fascists, but, because the circumstances were not changed, it was simply duplicated and limited by a second bureaucracy, namely that of the party; and this truly shocking pluralism, this duplication of all the official bureaucracies by the party bureaucracies, was not least a factor in the general, planned confusion of power relations that, in the end, was only too favourable for the monocratic leader principle under fascism. If one rails against bureaucracy and works towards restoring more direct relations between people amid unchanged ownership conditions, this almost inevitably leads to direct rule in the sense of a people’s community and similar things. So it is not about opposing administration as such but about its reification as power, which ultimately only mirrors the fundamentally reified, unchangingly reified character of the social structure.
If one now says – and this is the strongest argument, an argument that Max Weber already had at his disposal – that one can equally observe this hardening of bureaucracy in the socialist state of the east, this is undoubtedly correct as an empirical sociological observation, but not as actual proof. The reason is quite simply that there was a devilish necessity governing those developments in Russia; that is, what English economists refer to as the ‘skills’ [Eng.] of the workers, the development of human productive forces required to adapt to the demands of industrialism, was so underdeveloped, and might even have remained underdeveloped to this day in certain sectors, that it could only be corrected with the same whip that had been used for centuries in Europe to turn expropriated farmers into workers; this was rectified at one blow, namely with the whip, in the incredibly accelerated process of industrialization, and this in turn caused the bureaucracy to take on a life of its own. Please do not misunderstand: I am not condoning or downplaying in the slightest all the horrors that resulted from this independence of party bureaucracy in Russia; I simply wish to show you, at least by pointing out one aspect of this historical necessity, that we are dealing not with an immanent necessity of the concept of rational administration and planning, as Weber seemed to think, but actually with situations of duress resulting from the historical facts, though I cannot expand on this now.
Having spoken earlier of planned irrationality or the collision of irrational and rational elements, I must give you a more concrete idea of this antagonism, which is actually central today, by at least saying a few words about the overall social role of armaments – armaments all over the world, independently of the respective political systems. Arms investments gobble up the income of entire countries to a completely excessive degree that goes far beyond the comparatively modest circumstances of old imperialism. One might say that, given the unabatedly anarchic production and the resulting disproportionalities, it is only by accumulating means of destruction that society today – in all countries – can survive at all in its existing forms, that it continues to exist only because it is ready to blow itself up at any moment. I think one can hardly imagine any more vivid or drastic proof that we are living in a society of undiminished antagonism. But these stockpiled means of destruction, which obviously have a special dynamic, a dynamic of their own, especially through their entanglement with those in control of them, do not only threaten the life of every single person on earth at every moment; because the funds for their acquisition are diverted from the national product, the satisfaction of people’s objective needs that would be possible with the current state of technology is diminished in an almost unimaginable way, and certainly this is partly to blame for the fact that, today, on a truly telluric scale, people mistake all sorts of substitute gratification for true satisfaction. The central antagonisms, which continue to be located within the structure of society and not in the sphere of so-called politics, and which consequently appear in internal political tensions, are ideologically foisted off on foreign-policy conflicts. A substantial task for acquiring social insight today would be to analyse the entire sphere of foreign policy and armaments – on an international scale – from the perspective of domestic policy, or rather the overall social structure that conditions it. The political systems of the gigantic blocs – on both sides – largely take on the character of ideologies, preventing people from becoming aware of exactly these underlying social conditions. They attribute to the political systems what actually lies in the nature of the societies themselves. I would at least like to point out that the incredible growth of military power in the hands of small groups, which goes beyond any previously accumulated experience, and the virtual impossibility of resistance to the military power concentrated in these groups will scarcely leave the immediate power relations in society unaffected, without wanting to go into greater detail about that here. But this thought definitely follows on from those which present the politically organizational phenomena as epiphenomena of society. Just as they are actually mere expressions of society, I fear that, in a tendency towards direct power, they will once more gain direct power over society.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to use the meagre few minutes we have left to say a few more things to you – in similarly short propositions to those I advanced about the structure of society – about the position of ideology today, about the area of social reality, where my own critical experience applies most directly. First of all, let me say that, in keeping with the current negative state and the acceptance of this antagonistic state by the overwhelming majority of people in all countries, the oft-cited de-ideologization of the world is a fiction. And, to put it bluntly, it is precisely this de-ideologization itself that is one of the specific manifestations of ideology today – or, in other words, the reality in which we live, this antagonistic reality that is forced upon us, shows a tendency to become an ideology of its own. The example of this is consumerism, where people in all conceivable sectors of society consume and possibly enjoy what is forced on them out of no motive except profit, without any actual or even any potential subjective need for it; and then they even view this imposition as enjoyment and feel marvellously realistic when they buy televisions and all the other rubbish that goes with them, giving up their ideals without realizing that they are being fooled incomparably more by the trash that the entire consumer world has become than they were ever fooled in better times by ideologies, which were at least meant to have some ambition for truth, something that is now being abandoned. People see fulfilment, reality itself, in things that are mere substitutes, substitutes imposed on them by profit interests. And their so-called realism is an ideology, in the sense that their behaviour reproduces this behaviour which is forced on them – indeed, it must be said that they even continue it of their own accord. They participate in what is forced on them, they submit unconsciously to the ruling apparatus, and they consider themselves realistic because the context of delusion connecting them with what exists has become so complete that there is no longer any daylight between the false reality and their false consciousness. I think that only if one recognizes with such uncompromising severity what the true nature of so-called realism and so-called de-ideologization today actually is, only then can one face the current situation without illusions. The counterpart on the objective side of things is the merging of different apparatuses in society, namely those of production, distribution and consciousness qua industries of consciousness. Because all these sectors are seamlessly interlocked, and also substantially connected by unity of ownership and administration, the result is that seamless social façade which gives people the illusion that the airtight semblance in which they are operating is actually semblance-free reality.
Naturally these things can almost be observed most precisely, and I would also say most drastically, in America, this being the most industrially advanced country, where the electrical industry, as one of the most important sectors of the production sphere, is really directly interwoven with the distribution sphere and the ‘consciousness industry’,4 as Enzensberger called it. For example, it is simply the case that the biggest radio stations there are directly controlled by the most powerful elements of the consciousness industry. So ideology is no longer – as it was in the good old days, when Marx still attacked liberalism as ideology – something relatively independent of existence, no longer a theory that idealizes things, yet it also has the aim, however problematic, of explaining reality. No such theory exists any more within the framework of existing society, and it was only programmatic for this – and simply slightly ahead of the now universal spirit of positivism, rushing ahead of positivism as an ideology, to be precise – that fascism essentially dispensed with theory formation across the board, and that any content of consciousness which appeared in it served from the outset merely as a means of control. As an aside, this is what makes it so pointless to discuss what aspects of older tradition were pre-fascist, or might have driven people towards fascism, and which did not. Of course there is a certain – how shall I put it? – a core tendency of ideas that brought about fascism, but, apart from that, fascism was capable of adopting virtually any manifestation of spirit, without distinction, in so far as it contained some elements that were usable for its controlling purposes. This includes equally the categorical imperative, or – I would almost have said the one total substance of Spinoza, which was perhaps spared only because its originator was racially dubious. What has remained of the ideology today – if I can formulate this in a very extreme manner, which is the only way I can speak in this final session – is, on the one hand, the naked lie, the completely wilful invention, and, on the other hand, simply the reduplication of what is anyway the case as the only true, meaningful being, which can then justify itself with the claim that no other attitude to what positively exists is any longer conceivable. In this sense, Hegel’s theory of abstract possibility,5 which is frightening enough in its original setting, has now taken on a veritably satanic truth.
A decisive factor in this current manifestation of ideology is what Horkheimer and I – it must already be twenty years ago – called the ‘technological veil’,6 which replaced the so-called veil of money that once concealed social conditions after this veil of money had, through recurring inflations and value manipulations, also dissolved in the consciousness of the masses, who then ceased to believe that money was the thing itself, namely value in itself. What I mean by the technological veil is that constraints and necessities resulting from social conditions – for example, all the phenomena connected to the standardization not only of consumer goods but also of contents of consciousness – are ascribed to technology as such, completely ignoring things like the fact that, under the prevailing motive of profit, technology has been developed only in a very one-sided, particular fashion, namely to keep its production costs low, and that anything connected to decentralization, individualization or qualitative diversity has been suppressed and, if I might use the word, prevented artificially by this constraint of the profit motive. Here we must again overcome the difficulty I pointed out earlier, and which is in fact one of the greatest difficulties with a critique of contemporary society, namely that both the technological potential or state of productive forces and the conditions of production are not simply independent of each other but, rather, mutually conditioned, as the productive forces themselves already came about under certain social circumstances. If one now attributes their restriction to the conditions of production, someone can always reply, ‘Yes, but technology forces us, technology imposes it on us’, wilfully abstracting from the fact that technology itself is already the product of the conditions of production on which it depends and with which it seems to have a form of pre-stabilized harmony. One can counter this with a simple reminder that the productive forces of technology are shackled and pushed in a very specific direction, and that the prevailing conditions prevent anything which might enable technology to break through this veil that springs from its necessity. Here, too, I am pointing out only the most drastic aspect, namely that, despite its immense technological advances, humanity has still not succeeded in making nuclear power seriously fruitful for practical purposes, and, wherever steps are taken in that direction, one hears that they are still too expensive to be realized – and yet, as we know, nothing is too expensive when it comes to our annihilation.
The less ideology stands out, the more directly it becomes the objective spirit under which we are living. So it is no longer a theoretical construct; it is now neither the idealization of something existent nor its complement but, rather, the existent as appearance, the existent in the guise reflected in the total social consciousness, and thus objective spirit. This spirit is now infiltrating language most of all, which is why, if I may just say something subjective about my own approach, I think – and the work of Karl Kraus is already an excellent example – that ideology critique today is not so much a critique of an explicit, theoretically false content as simply a critique of the form in which certain content is expressed in the social consciousness, a form that contradicts the actual issue in question. And that, I would think, is why language critique is now really the appropriate form, or at least one of the appropriate forms, of ideology critique. Because of that – and this is very telling – a determined and radical critique of today’s prevailing language is automatically dismissed by the nominalists, who pretend that there is no direct identity between language and the content it expresses, meaning that language cannot be attacked as ideology; yet it is precisely this non-identity of content and language that reveals how this consciousness, which considers itself so realistic and believes it is aware of undisguised reality, already reveals through its very form that it is not conscious of this content. Subjectively, the form taken by ideology today is what I have suggested terming the ‘reified consciousness’,7 – that is, a consciousness which obeys the technological veil and unthinkingly speaks exactly the language that is imposed on it, and which moulds it according to its own thought structure. An insight offered by the brilliant Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is not without reason branded such a heretic today, namely that thought and language are constitutive of each other,8 is valid to this day, albeit in the negative sense that reified thought and reified consciousness and reified language produce one another, just as – to avoid any misunderstandings – critique of language does not have to be a merely formal critique of language but, rather, by drawing on that language form, is always forced to confront it with the content expressed, and finally – as I at least attempted in my forthcoming book The Jargon of Authenticity – to deduce the language itself, the falsity of the language itself, from the objective untruth of the matter. What I mean by reified consciousness, then, is a consciousness characterized by a number of categories developed, albeit overly psychologically and with too little reference to the social problematics we are discussing here, in The Authoritarian Personality. So it is a consciousness that is really incapable of having any experiences at all, because this objectification of what should be living relationships stands between it and its objects like a layer of armour. Being incapable of experience, it is atomistic, isolated, incapable of remembrance, gratitude or contemplation. As an acceptance of the façade it is uncritical, a peculiar second naïveté that is splendidly compatible with the jadedness of the so-called sceptical generation. It is a consciousness that adapts to the increasing reification of the world through the fact that, in this reification of consciousness, people act on the need both to turn themselves into things as far as possible and really to be dead simply in order to survive. A universal part of this reified consciousness is the ‘identification with the assailant’, the gesture of ‘Yes, but …’ when one calls it by its true name, as well as a willingness essentially to stave off anything that might turn it into a living consciousness. It is attached – and this brings me one last time to Weber’s means–end relation, Max Weber’s rationality – it is always attached to means, not to ends; this is another aspect of the technological veil, namely the quantum of libido, of love, that people invest in technology for its own sake, not for the sake of any ends. A phenomenology or a comprehensive and, shall we say, systematically deduced description of the reified consciousness would, as far as the subjective manifestation of ideology is concerned, surely be the most important task at present, and, if anything remains to be done on the subjective side, it would lie primarily in shattering the reified consciousness.
However, ladies and gentlemen, let me say one more thing after all this: while the world is increasingly hardening, ideology becomes increasingly thin because it is a mere duplication of the existent; although it becomes unresponsive, being fashioned from an almost impenetrable material, it has also become so thin that it can now barely serve its traditional function, namely that of concealment. Because humans have succeeded so completely in adjusting to the violence inflicted on them, it is now the soft spot; and it is therefore no coincidence, I would say, in the sense of historico-philosophical innervation, that so much critique today concentrates precisely on a critique of consciousness and ideology. The intellectuals are the organ of this critique, and it is precisely because the only possibility of looking beyond the existent at all has taken refuge in them and in this critique that they are so maligned today. The accusation, frequently made today and recently made so vocally by Gehlen too, that intellectuals have no function because they have no responsibility, attempts to commit them to the very ideology of the existent that one is meant to serve, but which they should be shattering. But it is not enough to analyse the details, as indispensable as that is, for all these things can only be achieved in a truly stringent fashion by gathering up what I have presented to you as elements of a critical theory into an actual unified critical theory, one that exhibits as much unity and fragility as the world today. But a programme such as the one I am presenting you in conclusion, if I am not mistaken, is precisely suited to the historical moment in which we find ourselves, namely a phase that permits such a critique, for it does not prevent it through direct violence, and yet no other kind of theory is possible because, in this phase, whose duration we cannot estimate, the possibility of an interventional, earnestly [transformative] practice is obscured.